Lvxferre @ lvxferre @lemmy.ml

This account is being kept for the posterity, but it won't see further acti

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4 yr. ago

A bit of calm/slow start, but still enjoyable nonetheless.

I don't fully agree with the approach, and I also think that generating no data is better in this case, but the reasoning is that the data being generated contains so much noise that it's useless for profiling. Or even poisonous, since it might create associations that don't exist (e.g. selling dildos to zealots, or advertising books on quantum mechanics to pet owners). As such, its attractiveness and thus selling value decreases.

Abridged pseudo-translation plus comments. Biased because I strongly disagree with the author.

"The new era for social media: how Threads changes the rules of the game"

Background on how Instagram grew

By using the Twitter API to allow people to follow through IG the people who they did from Twitter. Then Faecesbook bought IG, and promoted it in the FB "app" [SIC - the author talks about social media, but shows blatant ignorance on the difference between a platform and the software used to access it.]

Threads competing m. Twitter but being strongly linked to IG, heavy interoperability, Threads becoming ActivityPub-compatible soon, explosive growth, millions of users in hours.

IG growing first through the twitter API and now using the same mechanic in the other direction.

Why ActivityPub? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? NoN

Fuckenberg mentions that Twitter has still lots of network effect going on. Then the author mentions discussions on Mastodon about Meta destroying Mastodon + Fediverse... or rather, he makes a strawman out of them. And then he beats the strawman that himself created through something that boils down to "those discussions are bizarre lol lmao XD I assoome dat those full blood nurrds are ignorants on maths."

Then two parentheses later, the author claims that Meta doesn't give a fuck about ActivityPub or the fediverse... yeah, except that it's still adopting it and the author is so busy masturbating over "intenshuns" (wollen) that doesn't realise that, regardless of what Meta "wants", it's still able to cause damage.

Reason #1 - asymmetric network effect

The author tells us anecdotes on his times in Twitter, then claims that "asymmetric networks yield extra strong network effects". And by "asymmetric" he means that A following B doesn't require B to follow A. Under the following arguments: the larger my network (i.e. number of followers), the harder it is for me to transpose that network elsewhere, since those asymmetric connections are platform-exclusive, and the people are socially distant from each other.

More to come later as it's 9:00 here and I need my breakfast.

EDIT:

The author claims that Twitter was relevant, but not big, due to the asymmetrical principle. Then screwing over its API in the early 10s making it dysfunctional, with a big gap between its potential and actual situation.

Then the author claims that Meta is aiming for the ActivityPub for 1) Twitter having big network effect, and 2) being currently rather weak, and Meta leaving nothing to chance. That's a bit of a non sequitur IMO.

Then the author claims that, once Threads supports AP, its users will be able to follow European and German institutions and agencies.

Reason #2 - Creators

Musk drives influencers and creators off Twitter. So the move would be to appease creators who are more and more afraid of relying on the whims of a centralised social media company. Basically honey for the trap.

Except that, even if those creators end deplatformed or whatever from Threads, odds are that they won't be able to migrate their followers into the rest of the Mastodon side of the Fediverse. Threads would be so massive that it would be able to dictate "kick them out or we defederate you", so they'd end in relatively obscure spots. For us in Lemmy it's obvious that defederation is a mechanic of the federation, and how it's important to be there, but also that Threads can easily abuse it, if given room.

The Standard

Elon Musk making AP grow due to his idiocy.

Now, you can pitcure a Reddit one can riot in one or two years.

Come on this text was written across the revolt. Marcel Weiss is completely clueless on what's happening about the topic that he's talking about.

It doesn't fucking matter Meta's "intenshuns" regarding the Fediverse, that's only a big red herring. What matters is the effect, and how much power it would give Meta over the Fediverse. That's what the "ignorant nerds" are worried about, the whole protocol would gravitate around Meta alone.

我的錯

你TMD做了什麼??? :)

Cowardice might be a flaw, but it's easier to work with than recklessness.

I think that being raised by Heiter compensates it a bit. Heiter was often cheerful and supportive and, even if a bit of a lot of a drunkard, surprisingly humane.

They already exist. AdNauseam is a good example of that - it clicks advertisement links for you so it's harder to know what you're into.

I’ll waste a bit more of my time with you.

You do you, I don't care.

I don't know. And frankly, I don't think that anyone does, even if assumers are extra eager to vomit certainty on the solution, and then wallow on their own vomit. [As such, take everything that I'm going to say with a grain of salt - it might be completely wrong.]

It's perhaps even impossible to avoid echo chambers, based on the article hinting that the formation of echo chambers might be actually a human tendency that goes beyond social media or online environments.

That said, I have two infographics for you guys. One explores echo chamber (circlejerk) formation from the inside; another, through enforcement of "higher ups". (Open the pics individually to enlarge them.)
\

If Lemmy is to avoid echo chambers, I believe that it would need mechanisms that:

• attract people with minority views
• discourage attrition between users with different views
• increase the visibility and accountability of selective rule enforcement (the public modlog already does wonders for that)

The federative nature of the platform already helps a bit, I think, since nobody got the power to meddle with the whole Lemmyverse. And the ability to defederate is also part of that, as you can selectively cut off instances trying to enforce some echo chamber, that helps to protect minority views.

I also think that echo chambers are often further reinforced in social media through the cultural acceptance of three irrationalities, that might as well call "character flaws". They are:

• eagerness to vomit certainty. I think that reasonable = doubtful people coexist better with different points of views.
• oversimplification of complex matters. It's often a mechanism used to shun off everyone who doesn't think exactly in a certain way, as automatically defending the opposite view. ("You either like apples or bananas! If you say that you love bananas you're assumed to be an apple hater, REEEE!" style.)
• genetic fallacies ("[person] said it's chrue than its chrue lol lmao"). Because it's that sort of thing that the intellectually lazy use to brush off their doubt, so it tends to compound with both points above.

I don't like using ziploc bags because they're intended to be disposed afterwards, generating lots of garbage. Instead I reuse hard containers. For example, my freezer is full of ice cream pots with tomato paste, cat food, lime juice, sauce, things like this. It's still plastic but it fits better the two first R's (reduce, reuse).

Then I guess that your case is simply a failure at basic reading comprehension.

which is still answered by “Join Lemmy doesn’t know.”

Let me help you a tiny bit: the question is mostly rhetorical, and not the point of the post.

(Not wasting my time further with you.)

At the end of the day what I mean is simply that any somewhat scientific "split" will not match the countries, making the labels near useless for a "hierarchy" (tree-like model) of sorts.

One important detail to consider is expectations - I've noticed that plenty speakers in Brazil tend to associate EP with specifically Estremenho, and in Portugal it seems to be that BP is mostly associated with Paulistano. But since those two diverge quite a bit from each other, this difference ends [incorrectly] extrapolated to some expectation of otherness and uniformity in "Portuguese as spoken there".

Tendo dito isto, já que disse entender a variedade dos Açores: como classificaria a variedade deste vídeo - pt_PT ou pt_BR?

I do love how passionate you are about it though!

Thanks, and sorry - durante meus tempos de uni trabalhei com variedades locais (embora o foco fosse outro), então acabo falando um pouco demais do assunto, quando vem à tona.

TL;DR: no. Definitively no.

NTL;R: Okay... let me chew on this.

Lemmy as a whole is definitively more toxic than Reddit

For me, at least, non-contributive ("toxic") [see footnote] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, "didn't read but still replying lol lmao", insults, "I dun unrurrstand", whining + entitlement, and "chrust me" = "I take you for gullible". And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.

For the poster complaining about Lemmy, "toxic" would be, instead:

• pedants - pedants are fine as long as context-aware. And even then, I don't recall a single pedant screeching at my L3 broken English here, unlike in Reddit.
• purity testers - this can be interpreted 1000 ways.
• concern trolls - yet another thing far more present in Reddit than here...
• contrarians - "oh no what I say should be put in a holy altar, how do you dare to disagree with MEEEEEE?". Sorry but contrarians are leagues above the sort of circlejerking that you see in Reddit, where you'd get 1000 weaboos screeching because you wrote "animes".
• "ackshyually" - refer to what I mentioned already about context. Those "ackshyually" are caused by decontextualisation, that happens far more often in Reddit.

I know that what I'm going to say is anecdotal, but it's still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it's like "don't do that" "okay". In Reddit though? Well.

I was on Lemmy.word for slightly over a month and posted many times across numerous communities and instances, so I definitively gave it my best shot.

Depending on which instances yours federates with, you'll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.

Also Lemmy has backend issues

I'm no coder to claim that the issues are "backend" or "frontend". Instead I'll say the issues that I see:

• papercuts, like the bell icon staying even after you checked all messages
• a lack of mod tools
• rarely lemmy.ml (the instance that I'm in) slows down.
• In the past it used to show errors and refuse to load, but I don't recall this happening nowadays. And it never showed a downtime banana.
• can't cross-instance linking posts in a convenient way

So... come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it's likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.

Bad actors

Name them. Otherwise it boils down to "chrust me". Unless referring to the CSAM event below.

lemmy.world comm being bombarded with CSAM [...] Imagine if a subreddit had to be shut down because of this.

I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I'd expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there's only Spez's) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here's what would likelyhappen:

• subreddit mods ask for help to the admins, "we're being bombarded with CSAM". They hear admin crickets in return.
• mods lock subreddit to avoid the bombardment. u/ModCodeOfConduct forces them to reopen.
• mods eventually give up and leave. The sub becomes unmoderated and attracts paedophiles until you got a full paedo ring..
• the paedo ring grows large enough to get a mod outrage of 9001 subs.
• Spez deletes the sub while making a public announcement, like "WE SNOOS STAND AGAINST PAEDOPHILIA!" (cough former Reddit admin Aimée Challenor cough cough)
• the original userbase of the subreddit has no equivalent community to go to, because unlike in Lemmy you're expected to have a single sub per subject.

and sees an influx of kinder people

Dude. You're in Reddit. That's the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook's community look wholesome in comparison, it's on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.

And if you still want something nicer there's always Beehaw. I'm being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it's a go-to place. Provided of course that you don't want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don't want others to, otherwise they'll show you the door.

I disagree because sometimes you need to go against people too, not just the ideas. For example, if you protest against a politician trying to approve a law that fucks everyone for the benefit of his personal business, you are "punching" him metaphorically. If you bring the authorities against someone powerful for breaking the law, you're also "punching" the person. So goes on.

On the other hand, someone gave a great example, about someone poor stealing baby food. Calling the cops against the person would be to punch down.

It’s a stupid post that consists of a question

Read the rest of the post, not just the title. (And think on why the rest of the post is there on first place.)

[On-topic] The whole "punch up, never down" thing is about acknowledging that sometimes you need to oppose people. And it's morally better to oppose the ones "up" than the ones "down". That's it - in some situations it will break, but:

• since you're expected to behave nicely by default, it doesn't justify underprivileged people acting poorly towards everyone else
• it still gives room for people in power to criticise others, specially in defence of people with less privileges (note that "fringe extremists" often target vulnerable groups and individuals)

I do agree with you that it's tricky to apply, but it's still useful regardless; and while the danger that you're talking about is real, it has more to do with the certainty assigned to the inference than with the inference itself.

That's why I said it "hints that the reply..." instead of "means", or that the reason that Google answered is "likely related" - both words are there for a good reason, to highlight that this is not a conclusion. As in: it might be wrong, and both words acknowledge it.

Even not being solid info but just an inference, I still felt worth sharing for two reasons, that make the lack of reply noteworthy:

• Google, OpenAI and Meta/Facebook are roughly in the same situation (contacted by the author due to LLM development), and yet only one answered. Why?
• Politicians and corporations are generally eager to advertise their stuff, but extra careful with what they say on-record.

I'm not a control freak, I know that most things in life are outside my control, and I'm generally fine with it. And when those things outside my control are bad for me, I just... accept them while doing whatever I can to make them less bad?

Two people here mentioned media and booze. For me they're refreshment; they distract me from the problem that I can't solve, but they won't help directly. (Sometimes you do need a refreshment.) Same deal with cooking or talking with my pets.

It's risky but the risk is towards the users, and the profits are towards the companies.

I asked OpenAI, Google, and Meta what they are doing to defend against prompt injection attacks and hallucinations. Meta did not reply in time for publication, and OpenAI did not comment on the record.

Discourse analysis tip: what is not said is sometimes more important than what is said. The fact that they refused to reply hints that the reply would be against their best interests, either lying in a liable way or saying the truth and potentially ruining their investment.

The reason why Google actually answered it ("Google confirmed it [prompt injection] is not a solved problem[...]") is likely related to saying "it's an experiment" -

Regarding AI’s propensity to make things up, a spokesperson for Google did say the company was releasing Bard as an “experiment,” and that it lets users fact-check Bard’s answers using Google Search. “If users see a hallucination or something that isn’t accurate, we encourage them to click the thumbs-down button and provide feedback. That’s one way Bard will learn and improve,” the spokesperson said.

Can we [people in general] stop pretending that those models "learn"? Giving it feedback is like telling my cat "don't scratch it!" - it might work for that specific case, but it won't solve the underlying issue, so the model/cat will keep hallucinating/scratching something else. The hallucinations are not individual flaws, they're issues surfacing from the underlying tech: language associates morphemes (tokens) with meaning, not just a token with another! Linguists have been talking about this for at least a century, but those "tech bros" are still trying to model language without it. (Microsoft is apparently doing some progress in this regard though. I can look for the quote if anyone wants.)

Can we please leave the "I don't understand" meaning "I understand it but I disagree with it" redditism in Reddit? Let's call a duck a duck; you disagree with that view, it's fine, no need to mask it behind lack of understanding.

That said, this sort of rule of thumb always breaks down when you consider the edge cases. It's still useful as long as you have a default like "treat people decently", because it makes you consider that, when you go against someone more powerful than you, the person can fight back; people less powerful than you can't.